Food Truck Flash Mob Quashed In Santa Monica

A virtual flash mob of food trucks that successfully gathered at a Santa Monica parking lot (and raked in the dough) Monday was quashed Tuesday after the city announced that the mobile food court was illegal.

While the owner of the lot, car dealership owner Steve Taub, was okay with it (car dealers seem to have plenty of lot space these days), the city was not: "Basically, this was a non-permited use of the food truck [vendors] on that lot," Kate Vernez, assistant to the city manager, told the Santa Monica Daily Press.

She noted that City Hall was never contacted about the plans. The food vendors wanted to make the lot a daily gathering point for their eclectic, gourmet and ethnic fare. But while the trucks might have been individually permitted, the location was not.

Vernez told the Daily Press that she's researching city codes to find out if there's one the vendors can apply under in order to keep the roach coaches rolling to the corner of 14th Street and Santa Monica Boulevard. Taub said he would pursue legal avenues to keep the truck court going, too.

Organizers told the paper 1,200 people showed up to chow down Monday. Superstars of truck-dom, including Kogi BBQ and Border Grill's own mobile kitchen, were on-site.

L.A. Weekly staff writer Dennis Romero has worked on staff at several magazines and newspapers, including the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Los Angeles Times, where he participated in Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the L.A. riots. His work has appeared in Rolling Stone online, the Guardian, and, as a young stringer, the New York Times.